It Would Be Funny If It Weren't So Scary
“Glenn Beck is a logical thinker.”
These are interviews with the 60,00 to 70,000 people who turned out for the big Tea Bagger March in Washington. Apparently, you don’t have to really know anything about what you’re protesting. It’s all just bad because it is Obama, and some industry or media flak like Glenn Beck told you to be mad and scared.
The Tea Bagger protests were against, well, a lot of things, including health insurance reform, the IRS, abortion, global warming, and our “socialist/communist/fascist/Nazi/Muslim ” president, Barack Obama. Some of them called for a return to McCarthyism, while others called for Glenn Beck to run for office–indeed, it seemed the only thing that everyone agreed on was Fox News.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUPMjC9mq5Y[/youtube]
I find it strange how these are the Americans who were in support of spending close to $700 Billion on the War in Iraq killing their civilians but they are? against providing equal government regulated universal health-care to every American citizen that is similar to those who are in the military get
And even more surreal is this that these same anti-nazi/socialism/facism villagers aren’t willing to give anyone else a voice if it dissents from their own. So let’s see, what is one of the characteristics of socialism…oh yeah, that would be the idea of forceably quelling dissent.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Q7XH8lfGMc[/youtube]
If I were feeling sarcastic, I’d reply to the statement about the 60,000-70,000 people with the claim that it was in fact…er, I think the latest phony number is two and a half million people. Not to quibble, though, but “the idea of forceably quelling dissent” is not part of socialism. Many countries that could be considered socialist (Canada, Britain, Sweden, Spain, Germany) don’t quell dissent. And there are plenty of socialist programs here in the US: roads, public schools, public transportation, national parks…And you’ve already pointed out the war in Iraq. Even if we weren’t involved in that, the military is still funded with taxpayer money. Seems kinda, um, socialist, doesn’t it?
Thanks Christopher. You make a good point about socialism. I suppose our most contemporary version of communism would be most associated with quelling dissent. That, in and of itself, I don’t suppose is a formally stated precept of communism itself, but it is part of our contemporary experience of those governments who proclaim themselves communist. So your point is well taken.
I think the quelling of dissent came about in those places where socialist governments were put in place by revolution–the Soviet Union, China, Cuba. The people who came into power in those places were afraid of “counter revolutionaries” so they cracked down on dissent. Ultimately though it was just a way of staying in power. Even if Lenin, Mao Zedong, and Castro really believed in the idealistic views they espoused, power corrupts, and they and the governments they helped create quickly became just as bad or even worse than the governments they worked to overthrow.